The truth is, that in surveying Oriental empires from a distance, we are dazzled by the splendor of the kings and priests; drawing near, we find an oppressed and miserable slave class, from whose hard earnings the wealth of the great is wrung; called on to govern the country, we extinguish the kings and priests in the fashion in which Captain Hodson, in 1857, shot the last sons of the Imperial family of India in a dry ditch, while we were transporting the last Mogul, along with our native thieves, in a convict-ship to British Burmah. There remains the slave class, and little else. We may select a few of these to be our policemen and torturers-in-chief, we may pick another handful to wear red coats and be our guards and the executioners of their countrymen; we may teach a few to chatter some words of English, and then, calling them great scoundrels, may set them in our railway stations and our offices; but virtually, in annexing any Eastern country, we destroy the ruling class, and reduce the government to a mere imperialism, where one man rules and the rest are slaves. No parallel can be drawn in Europe or North America to that state of things which exists wherever we carry our arms in the East: were the President and Congress in America, and all the wealthy merchants of the great towns, to be destroyed to-morrow, the next day would see the government proceeding quietly in the hands of another set every bit as intelligent, as wise, and good. In a lesser degree, the same would be the case in England or in France. The best example that could be given nearer home of that which occurs continually in the East would be one which would suppose that the Emperor and nobility in Russia were suddenly destroyed, and the country left in the hands of the British ambassador and the late serfs. Even this example would fail to convey a notion of the extent of the revolution which takes place on the conquest by Britain of an Eastern country; for in the East the nobles are better taught and the people more ignorant than they are in Russia, and the change causes a more complete destruction of poetry, of literature, and of art.
It being admitted, then, that we are in the position of having, in Hindostan, a numerous and ignorant, but democratic people to govern from without, there comes the question of what should be the general character of our government. The immediate questions of the day may be left to our subordinates in India; but the direction and the tendencies of legislation are matters for us at home. There can be nothing more ridiculous than the position of those of our civilians in India who, while they treat the natives with profound contempt, are continually crying out against government from at home, on the ground set forth in the shibboleth of “India for the Indians.” If India is to be governed by the British race at all, it must be governed from Great Britain. The general conditions of our rule must be dictated at London by the English people, and nothing but the execution of our decrees, the collection of evidence, and the framing of mere rules, left to our subordinates in the East.
First among the reforms that must be introduced from London is the general instruction in the English language of the native population. Except upon a theory that will fairly admit of the forcing upon a not unwilling people of this first of all great means of civilization, our presence in India is wholly indefensible. Unless also that be done, our presence in India, or that of some nation stronger than us and not more scrupulous, must endure forever; for it is plainly impossible that a native government capable of holding its own against Russia and America can otherwise be built up in Hindostan. Upon the contrary supposition,—namely, that we do not intend at any time to quit our hold on India,—the instruction of the people in our language becomes still more important. Upon the second theory, we must teach them English, the language of the British government; upon the first, English, the language of the world. Upon either theory, we must teach them English. Nothing can better show the trivial character of the much-talked-of reforms introduced into India in the last few years, since our Queen has assumed the imperial throne of Hindostan, than the fact that no progress whatever has been made in a matter of far more grave importance than are any number of miles of railway, canal, or Grand Trunk roads. Our civilians in India tell us that, if you teach the natives English, you expose them to the attacks of Christian missionaries, and us to revolt—an exposure which speaks not too highly of the government which is forced to make it. Our military officers, naturally hating the country to which they now are exiled, instead of being sent as formerly of their own free will, tell you that every native who can speak English is a scoundrel, a liar, and a thief, which is, perhaps, if we except the Parsees, not far from true at present, when teaching is given only to a few lads, who thus acquire a monopoly of the offices in which money passes through native hands. Their opinion has no bearing whatever upon a general instruction of the people, under which we should evidently be able to pick our men, as we now pick them for all employments in which a knowledge of English is not required.
A mere handful of Spaniards succeeded in naturalizing their language in a country twice as large as Europe: in the whole of South America, the Central States, and Mexico. Not only there, but in the United States, the Utes and Comanches, wild as they are, speak Spanish, while their own language is forgotten. In the west of Mexico there is no trace of pure Spanish blood, there is even comparatively little mixture—yet Spanish, and that of the best, is spoken, to the exclusion of every other language, in Manzanillo and Acapulco. This phenomenon is not confined to the Western world. In Bombay Presidency, five millions of so-called Portuguese—who, however, for the most part are pure Hindoos—speak a Latin tongue, and worship at the temples of the Christian God. French makes progress in Saigon, Dutch in Java. In Canada, we find the Huron Indians French in language and religion. English alone, it would seem, cannot be pressed upon any of the dark-skinned tribes. In New Zealand, the Maories know no English; in Natal, the Zulus; in India, the Hindoos. The Dutch, finally expelled from South Africa in 1815 and from Ceylon in 1802, have yet more hold by their tongue upon the natives of those lands than have the English—masters of them since the Dutch expulsion.
To the early abolition or total non-existence of slavery in the British colonies, we may, perhaps, trace our unfortunate failure to spread our mother-tongue. Dutch, Portuguese, Spaniards, all practiced a slavery of the widest kind; all had about them not native servants, frequently changing from the old master to the new, and passing unheeded to whatever service money could tempt them to engage in, but domestic slaves, bred up in the family, and destined, probably, to die within the house where they were reared, to whom the language of the master was taught, because your Spanish grandee, with power of life and death over his family slaves, was not the man to condescend to learn his servants’ tongue in order that his commands should be more readily understood. Another reason may have caused the Portuguese and other dominant races of the later middle ages to have insisted that their slaves should learn the language of the master and the government; namely, that in learning the new, the servile families would speedily forget the older tongue, and thus become as incapable of mixing in the conspiracies and insurrections of their brother natives as Pyrenean shepherd dogs of consorting with their progenitors, the wolves. Whatever their reasons, however, the Spaniards succeeded where we have failed.
The greatest of our difficulties are the financial. No cheap system is workable by us, and our dear system we have not the means to work. The success of our rule immediately depends upon the purity and good feeling of the rulers, yet there are villages in British India where the people have never seen a white man, and off the main roads, and outside the district towns, the sight of a European official is extremely rare. To the inhabitants of the greater portion of rural India, the governor who symbolizes British rule is a cruel and corrupt Hindoo policeman; himself not improbably a Bengal mutineer in 1857, or drawn from the classes whom our most ignorant sepoys themselves despised. It is not easy to see how this vital defect can be amended, except by the slow process of raising up a native population that we can trust and put in office, and this is impossible unless we encourage and reward the study of the English tongue. The most needed of all social reforms in India, an improvement in the present thoroughly servile condition of the native women, could itself in no way be more easily brought about than by the familiarization of the Hindoos with English literature; and that greatest of all the curses of India, false-swearing in the courts, would undoubtedly be both directly and indirectly checked by the introduction of our language. The spread of the English tongue need be no check to that of the ancient classical languages of the East; the two studies would go hand in hand. It is already a disgrace to us that while we spend annually in India a large sum upon our chaplains and church schools, we toss only one-hundredth part of the sum—a paltry few thousands of rupees—to the native colleges, where the most venerable of languages—Sanscrit, Arabic, and Persian—are taught by the men who alone can thoroughly understand them. At the moment when England, Germany, and America are struggling for the palm in the teaching of Oriental literature—when Oxford, Edinburgh, and London are contending with each other, and with Berlin, Yale, and Harvard, in translating and explaining Eastern books—our government in India is refusing the customary help to the publication of Sanscrit works, and starving the teachers of the language.
So long as the natives remain ignorant of the English tongue, they remain ignorant of all the civilization of our time—ignorant alike of political and physical science, of philosophy and true learning. It is needless to say that, if French or German were taught them instead of English, they would be as well off in this respect; but English, as the tongue of the ruling race, has the vast advantage that its acquisition by the Hindoos will soon place the government of India in native hands, and thus, gradually relieving us of an almost intolerable burden, will civilize and set free the people of Hindostan.
CHAPTER XX.
INDIA.
“ALL general observations upon India are necessarily absurd,” said to me at Simla a distinguished officer of the Viceroy‘s government; but, although this is true enough of theories that bear upon the customs, social or religious, of the forty or fifty peoples which make up what in England we style the “Hindoo race,” it has no bearing on the consideration of the policy which should guide our actual administration of the Empire.
England in the East is not the England that we know. Flousy Britannia, with her anchor and ship, becomes a mysterious Oriental despotism, ruling a sixth of the human race, nominally for the natives’ own good, and certainly for no one else‘s, by laws and in a manner opposed to every tradition and every prejudice of the whole of the various tribes of which this vast population is composed—scheming, annexing, out-manœuvring Russia, and sometimes, it is to be feared, out-lying Persia herself.